Longnose

Thats fair, and TBH i had no conviction till I started playing with it. I did this purely from an educational perspective. But I think anyone who pays the little bit to get into the ecosystem and start playing with it from an open minded perspective will gain conviction quickly. On the other end of the spectrum. I still believe that circle of competence stuff. Stick with what you know and youll make as much or more. My fasciation with crypto is mostly that... Fasciation. Im not YOLOing into anything with crypto. I cant value it other than I am confident that it will shape the future. I still spend most of my time looking at businesses that have real revenues and cash generation for the majority of my investments.

I think we will get to a point where people wont realize the difference anymore. Eventually you'll be able to name your wallet like an email address. Your money will be tied to whatever wallet you make. Potentially hardware wallets could get to the point where you buy the equivalent of a raspberryPI that has a software preloaded. Where you set up the wallets for your household. I guess there may always be the group that doesn't even want to do that but w/e. I think DeFi will become more and more mainstream over time.

This sounds similar to what I think ZIL is trying to do. They call it creating shards. But it sounds similar to what you are describing and ultimatlely all the shards periodically sync to validate that the chain is correct.

Not exactly the market cap but still pretty absurd. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-bubble There was also almost nothing on the man behind them. Ty Warner had an education that consisted of one year studying drama at Kalamazoo College and a net worth that Forbes estimated at $2.6 billion, all of it the product of the three-year Beanie Babies craze

Good info! I'll be curious what BTC spits out in the DeFi realm. The whole reason I've actually steered clear of ETH is the transactional costs you mentioned. Which is why I've migrated towards AVAX. They are trying to solve transaction times, cost, and cross chain compatibility issues that are common in the ETH network. I believe SOL is doing similar to AVAX here but still haven't played with them. Also, AVAX has lots of DeFi projects on their chain. I love messing with the DeFi stuff so that's where I've been spending time. I know i listened to a really good podcast on lightning network stuff with BTC a while back. I'm also quite curious about this as well and have thought of taking it as a homework action to set up my own lightning BTC node and play with the lightning network. https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/bitcoin-full-nodes-instant-settlement-on-the-lightning-network-w-btc-sessions/

Does BTC have many DEFI projects going on? I honestly haven't played much in the BTC ecosystem other than owning some BTC. I've been playing with AVAX and ZIL quite a bit and am now delegating both. AVAX has lots of DEFI projects on its chain that I quite like and I feel they are attempting to solve some of the issues that ETH has weaknesses with. I've heard good things about Solana but haven't played with their stuff yet.

Bought MOMO 10$ calls for April yesterday. MOMO has announced a special dividend for the past several Februarys and usually has a nice run up into mid Feb. Short term speculative play.

Second this. Personally, The more I play with DEFI the more I want it mainstream. I want to hold my money and my assets in wallet and not in some middle man banking system. I want to connect to exchanges and make transactions there that are between me and the other party and not feeling like I am relying on 4 middle parties to make sure my money is backed by gold somewhere and that the assets and labilities are coming up and down on separate banking ledgers. I want to find companies that are focusing and leveraging the potential of these technologies though. Im curious more about SQ now that Dorsey has dropped twitter and is focusing on SQ and changed the name to Block and is working more in the crypto space. This company has real revenues and could seriously make waves.

I agree with SD that the physical world activity doesnt get changed or at least not easily. I think where things will get interesting is where blockchains can solve ledger related business issues. Entire industries exist to validate transactions. But when ledgers / accounts / data can be validated against private blockchain nodes held by various stake holders within a network and all members of the network want to share that data and maintain its privacy and accuracy. BlockChains can facilitate this. Theoretical example: medical records: These records are very sensitive and need to be accurate the amount of manual work and things that go on to pass these records between businesses is big and the amount of people touching it is big. But if medical records were held on a blockchain tied to an individual then the hospital sees the same thing as your private practitioner, your pharmacist, your insurance provider, etc. Each industry could hold its own node so that the insurance provider can validate that the records from the pharmacy and the private practice doctor are correct. This is a pretty astronomical example but i would not be surprised to see the world moving that direction. It will happen little bit by little bit. Until only a few noticed that it did. But the amount of OPEX each of those industry's will save by moving that stuff to blockchains will be substantial. BTC uses Proof of Work (PoW) to validate transactions which is one of the reasons I think BTC is more suited for a finance future as it is harder to validate and has a finite amount of tokens that can ever exist. ETH uses Proof of Stake (PoS) this proof of stake to validate the network makes it more suitable for smart contract usage. Essentially all the stakeholders need to align to validate the transaction. Then when the transaction is validated it can reward the nodes that are validating it. This is much more sustainable and easier to implement across various entities. Also could facilitate the "private" block chain as I don't want my medical records held publicly. Anyway. There are lots of business transactions that are transacting intangible items not tied to a physical action or product. Think real estate, title ownership, title insurance, and all the other bullshit that requires 10 people to touch your real estate purchase. None of this is happening overnight and is easily 20-50+ years out. Crypto to me is like looking at the internet in the 80's. We are still in diapers and who is the winner??? no idea... But I wouldn't not want to be exposed.

EDIT: in spirit of the overall thread Overall 2021 return ~32% I strongly agree with @rkbabang's statement of " I do think that anyone who doesn't have at least a percent or three of their portfolio in BTC is going to be sorry someday. " If you have not taken a look down the crypto rabbit hole, you should. Just taking the time to learn about what BTC & ETH really are and how they WILL impact the future will open your eyes. My personal opinion is that BTC will likely be the future of finance and very well could become a widely accepted form of currency. It may take 50+ years or longer to get there but I can picture a world where this happens. I think ETH and a few other projects will lay the foundation for smart contracts built on blockchains. I believe business transactions may start migrating this direction. We may see businesses in the future that have built themselves on blockchains based on ETH and other layer 1 projects that will allow them to eliminate substantial costs that current business today carry. By reducing that OPEX they these future businesses could have substantially better margins than their competitors. In short the underlying technologies coming from these technologies will radically change the future. @gary17 it is hard to assign a value to them but they are assets and they are not going away. My original thesis was I will spread 1% of my portfolio across about a dozen top crypto projects. This led me to want to learn more about what I owned. The more I looked the more I added. Since thanksgiving I have increased my exposure from 1% to 10% in personal accounts. Also, DEFI stuff is really amazing. In my fantasy world I would love to see the NYSE transformed into crypto tokens representing the ownership of my shares. Then I use a decentralized exchange to do my trades. The world is a hell of a long way off from doing that. But I can dream. Maybe ill see it before I die, who knows....

OESX

Prison Companies = GEO and CXW I looked at them when Burry posted his 13F. Ultimately decided to pass. "Try Wallstreet Bets, lol" - Agree with this. This is not the forum for you if you're looking for quick multibaggers. But you will come across some smart people and some really good ideas if you can do your own due diligence. When people talk about getting rich quick I think of a thread I saw on WSB (I like to lurk there for entertainment) Where the guy said your only 5 good trades away from being a millionaire. One of the top comments back was "Yea, and your only 1 bad trade away from workin behind Wendy's."

Opened a starter position in OESX

Same, I may actually read the books now. Sometimes I need a good movie to help me develop character attachment to jump start enjoyment of the books. I never would have read the Shadow and Bone series had it not been for the Netflix show. Currently reading Way of Kings by Brian Sanderson. Once I finish that I may attempt Wheel of Time again.

Just finished Wheel of Time on Amazon. If you enjoy high fantasy it was well done. I enjoyed it.

I like the idea. Have you read the book referenced? Makes me think of Ackmans's idea But with more of an active stance. https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaharziv/2020/12/07/bill-ackman-give-every-child-6750-so-they-retire-millionaires/?sh=6ed4b5107534

Moving the conversation to this thread per the recommendation. @SharperDingaan This is a kind of what I was expecting. I have a little portfolio exposure to BTC and a few ETH based tokens at the moment. But am treating it with the set it and forget it mindset. The volatility doesn't bother me. But I guess I don't want to be over exposed if a bubble pops. @TwoCitiesCapital I am interested in knowing more about what the services you mentioned. Celsius and Blockfi. Ill shoot you a PM. I've been poking around with yield farming and staking some ETH based project tokens. Anyone else playing with that?

I have read most the threads about Bitcoin and other Crypto stuff on this forum. I know that the general sentiment for Crypto is negative. But I wanted to ask and see if we have any closet crypto/blockchain bulls on this forum? Over Thanksgiving I took it upon myself to explore down the crypto rabbit hole purely from an educational / wanting to understand how it works perspective. This stemmed from a conversation with a friend who is very bullish on the space. My perspective has always been that I believe there is significant value to blockchain technology and potentially crypto currencies. But as a self proclaimed value investor I don't know how to quantify a value to any of it so I just steer clear of it. After exploring down the rabbit hole. I am now even more convinced that the blockchain technology & potentially crypto will be a massive part of the future of commerce. All this said I do think that cryptos are in quite a bubble. It definitely has trends that look similar to the dot.com era. People saw the internet and said this is the future and everyone was dumping money into all sorts of websites that have virtually no value. Crypto is similar where 90% of the projects have no value. But things like Bitcoin and Ethereum are laying infrastructure that will likely support the future of blockchain technology. There likely could be a bubble pop that could resemble the dot.com pop where Something like AMZN went from $100 in 99' to $7 in 01'. Has anyone looked at alternative ways to play in the blockchain/crypto space? I recently saw Jack Dorsey is resigning from Twitter to focus solely on SQ and is going hard on BTC integrations. I've also been a long term fan of what SQ has been providing small business. Anyways, I'm not looking to create a controversial thread but wanting to know if anyone else sees any of the positives that will come from this technology. Also, if anyone has identified "safer" ways to play crypto / blockchain tech besides speculating on coins/mining?

If I don't understand something that is popular or making headlines. I like to view it from a lens of what and I learn or understand from this? Its really easy to dismiss or get negative about things that don't make sense to us or go against current view of thinking. I mean go back a few hundred years when people consistently thought the world was flat or that there was nothing on the other side of the Ocean. Now jumping back to BTC or things that are perceived to have little or no value. In the beginning I would argue that BTC didn't have any value. Yet as years have gone on we see more and more intelligent people putting trust and money behind BTC and crypto. Which begs the question why??? I like to read classic novels movies, or art in the same vein. What makes Moby Dick so special? its just a book about a man obsessed with a giant fish. To many that is all it will ever be. To it becomes life lessons that can be adapted to many scenarios. Many of the investors in BTC may just be chasing the white whale of fast volatile yields. While another may see the future of our financial system. IMO dismissing BTC and other cryptos as having no value seems comparable to people assuming Christopher Columbus would never come back from his voyage across the Atlantic. We are probably very much still in the infancy of the crypto voyage but dismissing it as no value seems a pretty crazy assumption. If you don't want to support the journey don't put any money behind it. With Columbus's journey no one knew America existed till he returned. With BTC we have lots of information available if you want to dig into it and are tech savvy enough to understand it. I admit much of it goes over my head but when I attempt to look at the whole picture it makes me very curious about the future for BTC and other cryptos. I definitely don't want to just say Crypto is worthless and walk away.

2/18 BABA $165 and 2/18 BABA 160 calls

Hahaha, we cant all be as sharp as Li Lu. If I'm a quarter as successful as he is I'll be doing just fine.

Great Read! thanks for sharing. I read the whole thing in his voice and just kept thinking this must have been what it was like to have a smooth lecture by Li Lu. Not like when he was getting frustrated with Greenwald's class.

I was listening to TIP not to long ago and it auto played into this session. https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/bitcoin-full-nodes-instant-settlement-on-the-lightning-network-w-btc-sessions/ Normally I hear something start talking about BTC and I turn it off. However, I had recently taken a small amount of money and said you know I can't call the future of crypto but I do believe it will lay the foundation of the future so I'm just gonna spread this small amount of money across a handful of coins and let it ride. I then listened to this podcast. He dove deep into the back end of how transactions are occur with BTC. I admit that much of it went over my head. But It also further cemented my belief that this area is still the future of the world's financial systems. Not to say there isn't a bubble and who knows maybe we will collapse 99% of the crypto space. But if that does happen it will likely just be an incredible opportunity to add more money. The amount of money i have in crypto is very small in regards to my whole portfolio but I see more value in BTC at this point that gold.

Saw this on WSB. Made me laugh.